Bud Selig Is No One's Bud

Bud Selig is reportedly "very comfortable" with his decision not to award Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga with a perfect game.

Glad we could get that out of the way, Bud.

Professional sports' most aloof commissioner remains just that. The other side of his aloofness (you know, aside from arrogance) is that he's also utterly out of touch with fans.

You remember fans, Bud? The ones who used to follow baseball before your lockout. The ones who used to follow baseball before they found out all of their heroes were juicing.

But, as with the use of performance enhancing drugs, Selig is going in entirely the wrong direction with regards to umpiring and the state of replay

Keep in mind that it took an act of Congress, literally, to convince Selig to address PED use.

Now, in the midst of pitching's recovery from the Steroids Era, we have an umpiring controversy. And not just any controversy. No, we've got a controversy in which, by Selig's own admission, the pitcher, umpire, manager, team, and fans handled it all in an extremely classy way.

The commissioner, sadly, did not follow suit.

Selig spoke at length in complimenting the way others handled Galarraga's loss of a perfect game. I'm certain that was very gracious of him. Selig also stated his belief that "baseball people" are against the use of replay.

If he meant the same stodgy "baseball people" who wanted to sweep the Steroids Era under the rug or who wanted to keep African-Americans segregated from the majors for as long as possible, he would be right.

The rest of us checked our calendars and it was 2010.

Selig's reasoning for not updating the way games are called? That's right, people have been complaining about umpires since the 1950s. He then extended that window to major league baseball's beginnings in 1865.

Based on that wonderful logic, I'd imagine the MLB office doen't employ women. I mean, why change for change's sake?

For me, one of the dumbest things about Selig's comments was that he acknowledged that people have been complaining about umpires for that length of time, but didn't acknowledge, or even address, that the use of replay would result in a significant reduction in those complaints.

When initially responding to the Galarraga situation, Selig also cited that human error was part of the game.